What Makes Resident Evil 7 So Terrifying? The Humble Videotape

Share

What Makes Resident Evil 7 So Terrifying? The Humble Videotape

Capcom

In Resident Evil 7, you find the first tape upstairs. It rests in a lonely corner, a nearby lamp illuminating its resting place in stark contrast to the syrupy darkness overtaking the rest of the room.

You take the tape downstairs, to a television hissing with static, and slide it into the VCR. The camera zooms in, the world goes grainy, and you're somewhere else. You're someone else, too: a camera man, following a hacky TV show host and his assistant as they explore a creepy Louisiana plantation that you, as protagonist Ethan Winters, have wandered into in search of your missing wife Mia. A lot of players will naturally pause here, thinking they're watching a cutscene, before they realize that they're actually in control. This moment, stuck between past and present, toying with the player's sense of control and perspective, is Resident Evil 7 at its best.

Which is saying something. *Resident Evil 7 *manages to build on the roots of the venerable survival-horror franchise to deliver an exercise in sustained tension. By switching the perspective to first-person—the series has depended on the third-person view since its 1996 debut—RE7 crafts an experience that keeps one foot in abject terror and one in B-movie laughs. From its opening unhinged riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the more traditional bulk of its gameplay, it's an eerie, consistently entertaining puzzle box drenched in Southern gothic dread. And the videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.

Capcom

In the past few years, we've seen an evolving fascination with analog culture that sits somewhere between nostalgia and dread. There's something uncanny about unspooling film, gray television static, the crackle and hiss of analog tape. In RE7, its grainy filter evokes found-footage horror, a genre that hasn't yet influenced survival horror games for the better. Each tape shifts your reality as a player, your perspective warping through space and time as you enter the pocket world of the tape. What's more, the moment invites confusion, which easily blossoms into terror: Who am I? How did I get here? Games have the unique ability to make the player question the very identity they're occupying, and that first tape takes full advantage of this to disorient the player.

There are other tapes scattered throughout Resident Evil 7's runtime, and they all work identically, transporting the player into the shoes of different characters at different moments in the history of the Baker plantation. None of them are as disorienting or surprising as the first, but they all effect that same sense of alienation and discomfort. They are used to preview areas of the plantation you haven't been to yet, disrupting the navigational senses you learn to rely on in your time there. They all, likewise, end in one disaster or another, giving them the sense of omens, carefully placed warnings—and, occasionally, clues. In one particularly clever moment, you have an opportunity to complete one of the game's more devious puzzles twice: once inside the world of a videotape, and once for real, using the knowledge gained through that experiential proxy.

The videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.

Tapes have long been a means of supplemental storytelling in games, but too often developers try to game your attention by making them collectibles: play them all, get an achievement. As such, their impact, like their physical medium, has degraded over time. The designers and writers at Capcom, though, have found in them a way to revitalize videogame narrative. Because the player develops a connection with their character, developers assume, it's necessary to confine them entirely to that perspective. This can be offer a sense of lived experience, but when games are trying to tell complicated, broad stories, these limitations feel incredibly awkward, like films shot without any cuts.

The videotapes ignore that sanctity of continuity, and the newfound freedom to switch perspectives gives Resident Evil 7 moments where it can do what good storytelling ought to always do: present the most interesting moments of its world in the most interesting order, freely cutting from one perspective to the another in order to accomplish it. And it does so in the most Resident Evil way possible—with creatures always lurking around hidden corners, thick with static and a sibilant hiss.